It sounds like you have a third party program that has taken over your search engine, home page, and/or the default new tab page. Fortunately, this can be remedied easily:

1. Click the menu button and choose Add-ons.
2. In the Add-ons Manager tab, select the Extensions panel.
3. Select the toolbar you wish to remove.
4. Click the Remove button.
5. Click "Restart now" if it pops up. Your tabs will be saved and restored after the restart.

After Firefox restarts, install the Search Reset Tool. This add-on will remove the rest of the traces of this program from your Firefox and then uninstalls itself.

For further information, please read Remove a toolbar that has taken over your Firefox search or home page.

Did this fix the problem? Please let us know!

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar and search for prefs that refer to ask.com. You can reset user set (bold) ask.com pref(s) prefs via the right-click context menu to the default value.

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/about:config

If you do not keep changes after a restart or otherwise have problems with preferences, see:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved